Introduction to R

The History

Mayank Agrawal
Senior R developer Consultant I
ProCogia

Thursday, August 17, 2023

R is Quirky

“The best thing about R is that it was written by statisticians. The worst thing about R is that it was written by statisticians.” - Bow Cowgill, Google

Hello, There

This presentation will touch base on the following sections:

Introduction
Interesting Facts about R
Why use R?
RStudio IDE
R vs Python
The R Ecosystem
R Popularity Ranking

Introduction

R is primarily a statistical language developed in 1993-1995 by Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka at the University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand.
Over the years, R has matured to be one of the preferred languages in the coding arsenal of Statisticians, Data Scientists, Data Engineers, Data Analysts and Data Miners.
Application Domains: Healthcare, Academics, Consulting, Finance, Insurance, Media, and many more.
Most famous applicability trend: Machine Learning, Data/Business Analytics, Data Visualization, Dashboard Development, and Analytics Application Development.
R is available across platforms - Windows, Linux, MacOS.

Interesting Facts about R

R is open-source programming language with its roots from S programming language.
R was conceived in 1993, initial version was released in 1995 and a stable R version was released in 2000.
It was named after the first names of its first two authors.
A hidden gem, R supports both procedural programming and object-oriented programming.
The number of R packages available either through CRAN or GitHub is 1, 00, 000 and they do epic stuff with just one line of code. It could range from Regression to Bayesian analysis.
Started gaining popularity for its support for reproducible workflow from researchers at academia.

Why use R?

878 R User groups, 90 countries, 414 cities, 775,379 members.
Open-Source programming language.
Rich eco-system to help end-to-end analytics flow from data sourcing, data loading, data manipulation, data engineering, analytics, dashboard development, report renders, automated emails to schedulers.
Ability to integrate with other programming languages - Python, Java, .Net, C, C++ and much more.
Has one of the strongest vast active community of R users, growing day-by-day.
Multiple micro communities to share learnings - R Ladies, R Consortium, R Stats, R Weekly, R Users, Data Science Hangout,
Backed by POSIT ongoing innovation and focus on ease of use and expanding capabilities.
Check out R User Community Dashboard

RStudio IDE

RStudio IDE Continued

RStudio is the preferred IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for R programming.
RStudio is free and open source.
USP: version control and project management.
RStudio has four main panes each in a quadrant of your screen:
- Source Editor
- Console
- Work space Browser (and History), and
- Plots (and Files, Packages, Help).

R Products Integrations

R Ecosystem

R Popularity Ranking (Dec 2022)

R Vs Python

Feature	R	Python
Scope	Statistical language	General purpose language
First Release	1993	1991
USP	Statistical analysis, data exploration and visualization	ML, Deep Learning, Big Data
IDE	R Studio, VSCode	Jupyter notebooks, Spyder, VSCode, PyCharm
Common Libraries	tidyverse, caret, shiny, rmarkdown, ggplot2, plotly	Pandas, Numpy, Matplotlib, TensorFlow, scikit-learn
Eco System	~20,000+ packages on CRAN	~300,000+ packages on PyPi
Trend (Dec 2022)	11 in TIOBE and 7th in PYPL	1 in TIOBE and 1 in PYPL

References

The R Ecosystem Slides Link
R: Then Vs Now Slides Link
R popularity index Link
R Programming Introduction Link
R Community Shiny Dashboard Link
R User Community Shiny Dashboard Link
R Ladies Shiny Dashboard Link